The targeted assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founder of the militant Hamas group, by Israel was a dangerous act of escalation. Hamas, locked in a violent campaign with Israel, responded to the outrage with threats to "send death to every house, every city and every street in Israel." Hamas has avenged Israeli targeted killings with suicide bombings in the past. <br /> <br /> The 67-year-old Sheikh Yassin founded Hamas after the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada in 1987. After keeping him in prison for eight years, Israel had to set the Sheikh free grudgingly in 1997 in exchange for Mossad agents captured by Jordan during a botched assassination attempt against Khalid Meshal, a prominent Hamas leader, in Amman. Frail, nearly blind and wheelchair-bound, and often at odds with the Palestinian Authority, Sheikh Yassin had come to symbolize the violent quest for freedom of the Palestinian people. <br /> <br /> Physical elimination of Palestinian militants has been a longstanding policy of Israel, and Sheikh Yassin is the most prized human target so far. Israeli military made an unsuccessful attempt to kill him in September last when it attached a building in Gaza where he was holding a meeting with missiles. Sheikh Yassin, in fact, has been a soft target for Israel. Unlike most Hamas leaders, he was not in hiding. For years, he lived in the same house and went to the same mosque for his early morning prayers. <br /> <br /> But Sharon's strategy to decapitate Hamas by eliminating Sheikh Yassin could well end up drawing a hundreds of new recruits to the movement and radicalising its support base. Sharon is no fool but then he has a political agenda. It may have left Hamas without its charismatic leader, but it is unlikely to dull its determination to step up its attacks on Israel. Predictably, Izzedine al Qassam, the armed wing of the Hamas movement, said in a leaflet that its response to the assassination of Yassin would be "like an earthquake that will shake all the state of Israel". <br /> <br /> Yassin#146;s death leaves Hamas in the hands of the movement's most radical figure, Abdel Aziz al-Rantassi, who had himself escaped an Israeli assassination attempt in June last. On March 22, he declared "open war against the assassins". Rantissi, who is staunchly opposed to any compromise with Israel, will take away the moderating influence that the Sheikh represented in the organisation. <br /> <br /> The killing of Yassin was reminiscent of Israel#146;s assassination of Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash in Gaza in January 1996. Hamas responded to the killing of Ayyash, dubbed "The Engineer" by Israel, with a series of deadly suicide bombings inside Israel that killed nearly 60 Israelis in the gap of 10 days. This sudden spiralling of violence was the first in the chain of incidents that gradually marked the beginning of the end of the Oslo peace process before it was finally sunk in September 2000 by the violence that followed Sharon's much-publicised illegal entry to the Temple Mount. <br /> <br /> As for Sharon, he has timed this act of provocation to the planned withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza. Under the plan initiated by Sharon, Israel is to dismantle 21 of its settlements from Gaza and initiate troops pullout. The message Sharon wants to convey is that when the disengagement from Gaza is finally implemented, Hamas will not be able to claim that the withdrawal was prompted by the group#146;s terrorist operations and that if these attacks continue, they will lead to a complete Israeli withdrawal from West Bank as well. <br /> <br /> More Right wing coalition partners of the Israeli Prime Minister, notably the Shas party, are opposed to the Gaza pullout plan. They fear that in the wake of the pullout, Gaza will be consumed by anarchy, and Hamas will take control of the street. That will be the end of the tether for the pragmatic Palestinian Authority, they say, which will not be able to maintain even law and order. The Israeli military has reached the conclusion that Hamas was planning to launch an all-out terror campaign, which was signalled by the double suicide bombing in Ashdod port on March 14, in which 10 Israeli civilians were killed. <br /> <br /> One factor that may have weighed heavily on Sharon's mind seems to be the humiliation suffered by Israel in southern Lebanon in May 2000. The then Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew troops from the "safety corridor" Israel held for 22 years under pressure of growing casualties caused by the Hezbollah guerrilla attacks. Though Barak was only honouring an election promise, the Shia militant organisation played up it as a major victory over Israel. At that time, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah made a rousing speech, saying Israel lacked the staying power. Even now, the manner and the way in which the country abandoned the "safety corridor" rankled many in Israel. Four years later, Sharon is determined to avoid the same ignominy when the Israeli army completes its promised withdrawal. To ensure that there will not be much for celebration in Gaza, and to win back his losing ground in the Likud party, Sharon needed Sheikh Yassin's head. <br /> <br /> The Israeli Prime Minister's plan will get him nowhere. By assassinating Sheikh Yassin, he has made sure that if, a big if, he withdraws his troops and settlements from Gaza, it will be under the hail of gunfire. He also made it certain that Hamas' power for armed resistance and suicide bombings will remain far from diminished. If anything, he has pushed it to a more hardline mould. Even the talk of a revival of the peace process and progress on the much-vaunted American roadmap, agreed at the Aqaba summit in Jordan last year, have become a casualty now. <br /> <em>Email ID:
[email protected]</em> <br /> <em>* Views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Observer Research Foundation.</em>
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